Custom skins

Custom "User" skins are a great way of giving the game and your favorite vehicle your own personal touch. All playable machines in game have the ability to generate a user template for you to edit and create your own skins and camouflage designs. Custom User skins allow for endless creativity with your own creations as well as historical or fiction designs. It is free and easy to do. Keep in mind though that custom skins do not appear to the other player when playing online as they are purely local files. Only you can see them, unlike the ingame skins.

A great amount of skins and camouflages can be found on the community hub live.warthunder. This allows skin creators to upload and share their designs with the whole community and for all players to download and use skins of their choice. You can also rate and like your favorite designs to let the content creators know their work is appreciated.

To search for a particular vehicle, simply type a simplified name with a hastag ("#") at the front.
An example:

1. You want a new skin for the "P-51D-5 Mustang". Simply type in the search bar top right: #p51

2. A variety of pictures should appear now. Click on the one you like and download it by pressing on the big green button.

3. Now open the "WarThunder" installtion folder on your computer. The standard location is C:\WarThunder\ . For Steam users the location is found here C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\War Thunder .

- If not, there is an easy way of finding it. Press with your right mouse button on the War Thunder icon. Click on the bottom label ("Properties" in english). The now open window now shows the directory and place of the folder. It also has a button ("Open directory") beneath "Commentar" and left of "Change symbol". Pressing this button will bring you directly to the correct folder!

4. Create the folder/file UserSkins in there. Or go ingame, open the customization window by clicking on the brush and finally click on the stick (wand) in the bottom left. This will create the right folder/file too!

5. If the file came as .zip or .rar, open the download folder and scan it with anti-virus tool. Then de-zip/decompress the file.

6. Take the files and put them in the new folder from step 4. You can now delete the original download files, if you still have them.

7. Go into the game again and select your new custom skin in the customization window by clicking on "Disabled" in the bottom left.

" How to make User Skins! " - Custom Skin Tutorial by Webe

With update 1.53, we introduced Physically Based Render and shading. This makes the models and map texture, more realistic You can find more information on: PBR texture compliance page